


I Bet You Look Good on the Dance Floor

by comically_so (knobblyfruit), knobblyfruit



Category: Pundit RPF, Pundit RPF (US)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-07-17
Updated: 2009-07-17
Packaged: 2017-10-18 00:35:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/183059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/knobblyfruit/pseuds/comically_so, https://archiveofourown.org/users/knobblyfruit/pseuds/knobblyfruit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four times Keith caught Anderson dancing, and one time he didn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Bet You Look Good on the Dance Floor

**Author's Note:**

> Huge thanks goes to [](http://dutchtulips.livejournal.com/profile)[**dutchtulips**](http://dutchtulips.livejournal.com/), who would not let me let this go, and finally bribed me with porn to finish it. Blame goes to Anderson Cooper himself, for refusing to dance on television. The only logical conclusion is that he dances when he thinks no one is looking, right? Title from the Arctic Monkeys song.

**1.**  
Keith didn’t visit Anderson’s studio often. There’s always too many people staring and whispering to each other when he goes by. It’s not “Hey, that’s the guy with Anderson Cooper.” It’s more like “What the hell is the guy from MSNBC doing here?” Like he’s there to spy on them or something equally ridiculous. Anderson gets the same deal when he visits 30 Rock, so they usually arrange to meet somewhere when they have lunch together.

Today, though, they hadn’t made any plans, and Keith was in the mood to surprise him.

On his way to Anderson’s office, he ran into Erica. She smiled and said, “You might have to really bang on the door. He’s got his music blasting again.”

He rolled his eyes playfully. “Of course he does. I think the man was born with that iPod and no one thought to have it surgically removed.”

Erica laughed and continued on her way.

Instead of knocking, though, he figured the best way in was to just enter. So he did.

And the grin that spread across his face was unstoppable.

Anderson was sitting in his chair, eyes closed, lightly headbanging and doing some interesting air guitar as well as he could with a desk in front him. When the song’s guitar solo ended, he started twisting around in his seat and singing along.

Keith knew he couldn’t hold in his laughter forever, so he inched his way to the wall the iPod dock was plugged into and pulled it out.

The moment the music stopped, Anderson’s froze and his eyes flew open. He tried to hide his embarrassment with a glare. “Dammit, Keith!”

Keith finally gave in to his laughter. “Working hard or hardly working, eh, Cooper?”

Anderson threw a pen at him in reply.

  
 **2.**  
The people were loud and the music was louder. There was the distinct smell of body odor in the air and this wasn’t the greatest rum and coke Keith had ever had. Not their usual kind of hangout, but it was Stephen’s turn to pick and for some godforsaken reason, he’d picked this place. Stephen would never admit it, but Keith knew this was revenge for the time he had picked a sports bar to watch the game and he and Jon argued over Yankees vs. Mets for so long that they didn’t notice Stephen and Anderson had left until an hour after they’d done so.

He could take a little payback.

“What’s this place called again?” Jon was practically yelling just to be heard. “I have to put it on my Never Again list.”

“El Perro Fumando!” Stephen replied, complete with a proper accent and waggling eyebrows. “The Flaming Dog!”

Beside him, Anderson burst into drunken giggles. Keith could hardly believe what a lightweight the man was – he’d only had a couple gin and tonics. “No, you dummy. It’s The Smoking Dog!”

Stephen furrowed his brow in the classic confused look that all drunk people seem to master. “It’s not the flaming dog?” He sounded disappointed.

“The dog isn’t gay,” Jon said. Keith snickered.

“I wasn’t suggesting the dog was gay, I was suggesting –“ Stephen abruptly stopped speaking. His eyes lit up and a grin spread across his face. It took Keith a moment to realize he was listening to the music pounding around them.

“My-my-my-my-my boogie shoes!” Stephen jumped out of his seat and grabbed Anderson’s arm. “C’mon, Cooper! Let’s dance!”

Instead of firmly protesting like Keith expected him to, Anderson only laughed and allowed Stephen to drag him to the dance floor.

The grin on Keith’s face nearly matched Stephen’s. This was gonna be good.

Sure enough, they were already engaged in a two man conga line, not caring that it didn’t really match the beat of the song.

He heard some fumbling behind him and turned to see Jon taking his iPhone out of his jacket pocket. The grin never left his face as he said, “Jon, if you try to take any video of them, I’ll shove that phone so far up your ass, you’ll need a specialist just to find it again.”

Jon visibly hesitated, then slowly set the phone back in his pocket. Keith thought he heard something about “party pooper” being mumbled as he turned back to Stephen and Anderson, but he wasn’t sure. He just wasn’t willing to deal with an utterly humiliated Anderson Cooper, if he ever saw video of what he was doing now.

Now the two dancers were doing something vaguely resembling a tango, and Keith could tell they were both singing along with the song at the top of their lungs, though he couldn’t hear them. Anderson’s face was lit up with laughter as he twirled Stephen around, and Keith was glad he was letting himself go, if only for awhile.

Yeah, Keith wouldn’t need a video to remember this.

  
 **3.**  
Keith heard the music before he’d even opened the door. He stopped in front of their apartment, wondering what the hell Anderson was doing that he needed the music to be that loud.

The answer was obvious as soon as he opened the door.

Anderson was standing behind the counter, his back to Keith, dressed in a pair of boxers and one of Keith’s old t-shirts. That normally would have gotten Keith’s attention, but what Anderson was doing trumped it.

He was dancing. With a broom.

He twirled the broom around as if it were a person, from one hand to another. Then he pretended it was a microphone, holding the handle near his mouth as his body did what Keith assumed to be an Elvis impression.

“I wanna kiss you every minute, every hour, every day! You got me in a spin, but everything is –“ On the word “spin” he’d spun around – to see Keith smirking at him.

Keith could see Anderson’s face flushing as he turned off the music. “I sure hope you were singing to me. I’d hate to be jealous of a broom.”

“Well, the broom has a greater chance than you right now,” Anderson grumbled as he returned to cleaning.

  
 **4.**  
They were at some fancy hotel in DC for a charity gala. Keith had lost track of Andy ages ago; he probably had gone back up to their room, considering his penchant for parties.

After a couple hours of mingling, he decided he’d had enough. He said his good nights to the people he’d been chatting with and headed for the elevator.

He pressed the up button and stood back to wait. While he did, three other people came up to wait with him. After what seemed like forever, he finally heard a ding and the elevators doors opened.

Someone beside him gasped.

Inside the elevator, with his back to the doors and a head of gray hair that Keith would recognize anywhere, was a man who was apparently really into the music he was listening to on his iPod.

Anderson swung his hips around and moved his arms in sync with a beat only he could hear. He was also humming. Loudly.

With one last flourish, he whirled around…only to face the small crowd who had gathered to watch him.

Keith had never seen someone turn that red so quickly before.

  
 **5.**  
Keith gently closed the door behind him as he entered the apartment. The kitchen was dark, but he could see a soft glow of light in the living room. Anderson was home.

He set his briefcase and keys on the counter, shrugged off his jacket and set it on the back of a chair, and tugged off his shoes. As he got closer to the living room, he could hear quiet music playing.

He stood in the entryway, gazing at the exhausted-looking man on the sofa. Anderson was sitting in the middle, Molly’s head on his lap with her body stretched to his right. His head was tilted against the back, arms and legs spread out, eyes closed as if he’d just flopped there when he got in and hadn’t moved since.

Though apparently not before he lit a fire in the fireplace and hooked his iPod up to its speaker system.

Anderson didn’t purposely relax all that often, but when he did, this was usually the way he chose to do it. Unfortunately, Keith had learned it was an attempt to counteract the chaos in his head. Anderson had just returned from Iraq. He was probably seeing explosions and dead bodies in his mind’s eye.

Keith softly stepped his way across the room to the couch, where he sat down carefully, not wanting to disturb Anderson.

But of course Anderson felt the couch dip, anyway. “Hey,” he said without opening his eyes.

“You know, you could be nonchalantly greeting an axe murderer right now.”

Anderson lifted a hand to scratch behind Molly’s ear. “Molly would have let me know.”

“Not if I looked friendly,” Keith pointed out.

Anderson finally opened his eyes and lifted his head to look at him, eyebrow raised. “You know a lot of friendly-looking axe murderers?”

Keith shrugged. “No one suspects the butterfly.”

Anderson snorted and leaned his head back and closed his eyes again.

Keith reached over to give a gentle squeeze to Anderson’s thigh. “How was Iraq?” he asked. Anderson would deny it, but Keith knew talking about it made him feel better.

“Not bad. Talked to a lot of people, American and not. Got some pretty good footage. Should make for an interesting piece. Gotta go in early tomorrow to put it together.”

Though Anderson couldn’t see it, Keith rolled his eyes. In that brief moment of silence, the song in the background changed to something slow and jazzy. “Well, great. Now I know how it was for Anderson Cooper: Journalist Extraordinaire…” He grabbed Anderson’s hand and pulled him off the couch, ignoring his feeble protests. He pulled Anderson close and wrapped his arms around him right in the middle of the living room. “…but how was it for Anderson Cooper: Regular Human Being?”

Anderson sighed as he leaned into Keith’s embrace. His hands came up Keith’s chest to grab fistfuls of his shirt, like it was the only thing anchoring him to the ground. They began to sway along with the music, slowly shuffling their feet.

As Keith ran soothing fingers up and down his back, Anderson whispered, “It sucked.” He cleared his throat and started again. “We were in a poorer area of town, where the violence is more rampant.” Keith instinctively held him tighter, knowing it was useless to say anything about it. “And there was this little girl, no older than five, wandering the streets by herself. It took a little while, but we found out her parents had been killed in a car bombing the week before and she didn’t have any other family. She wouldn’t come with us, and we didn’t exactly have the authority to make her. The actual authorites apparently had bigger things to worry about. She wasn’t the only orphan around, after all.” He let out a shaky breath. “We had to leave her there.”

Keith pressed a kiss into Anderson’s hair. “You’re a stronger man than me, Andy.”

Anderson only shook his head against Keith’s chest, and Keith knew better than to argue. If he did, they’d be there all night debating who was stronger than who. Anderson knew Keith meant it, even if he didn’t agree.

They stayed like that in silence, holding each other and slowly rocking side to side, getting lost in the music and in each other. When the song ended, Keith gently dropped his arms down and once again took Anderson’s hand.

“C’mon,” he said. “I think there’s a bed here with our names on it.”

END.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. I've heard that Erica has actually said that sometimes she can hear Anderson's music blasting in his office. What else could he be possibly doing in there?  
> 2\. Anyone who knows what other show this is not-so-subtley referencing gets a special e-cookie. The song Stephen and Anderson are dancing to is "Boogie Shoes" by KC and the Sunshine Band.  
> 3\. This was just an excuse to have Anderson dancing with a broom. The song he's singing is "I Believe In a Thing Called Love" by The Darkness.  
> 4\. This one was [](http://dutchtulips.livejournal.com/profile)[**dutchtulips**](http://dutchtulips.livejournal.com/) idea. The image of Anderson dancing by himself in an elevator was too good to pass up.  
>  5\. It's not specifically mentioned (beyond "slow and jazzy") but, in my head, the song they're dancing to is "Nature Boy" by Abbey Lincoln. I got it from [Anderson's On-The-Road Playlist](http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c212/pipfoo/Random/andysongs.jpg), which is also where I got the song I used for a title.


End file.
